1. We begin

Your breath collects near you, small puffs of semi-luminous effervescence that disappear into the darkness.

The room is cold, frigid if you’re being honest.

No, frigid doesn’t cut it. Sure, the temperature must be below ten degrees celsius, but what sticks out as the minutes creep by is the sensation of your body conserving heat. First, there’s the refreshing crispness that overwhelms every exposed surface, a deceiving taste of what’s to come. Then, the biting, near piercing sensation ripples out across your skin, a thousand needles driving themselves into every inch of your shivering limbs. Finally, the numbness, a slow burn that inches its way beyond your subconscious, its effects only becoming horrifyingly apparent after you try and warm your palid nose.

Still, you can stand this physical cold. You’ve definitely weathered much worse.

What stings is the hole in your consciousness. There’s a gap in your memory, one that can’t be easily fixed by asking someone else. You don’t remember your name, or anything about yourself. You don’t even know what you look like, and for the first time you curse whoever has put you inside this barren room.

When you can’t even remember who you are, what is left of you? Sure, you might be able to make small observations about your body, but what is the body if not a vessel for your thoughts? And when these thoughts run ungoverned by the gravity of a persona, is there a meaning to one’s action at all?

I find this to be the central conflict at the heart of most stories told today. At some level, it is an exploration of identity, be it the protagonist’s, the reader’s, the location’s, or something in between. Ultimately, identity is fundamental to the human experience.

Is it any wonder then, that most works that have catapulted into the public consciousness as of late revolve around the misplacement of one’s identity?

Think Spirited Away (2001), Death Parade (2015), Memento (2000), even Finding Dory (2016). The gimmick of character suffering memory loss aside, there is evidently something thrilling about this kind of story. Still, I hope to convince you that, even apart from this genre, all stories in general, be it put to paper or film, revolve to some extent around one’s search for identity.

Nowhere was this clearer to me than in my recent viewing of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020).

2. Nomadland (2020)

We begin on the road. Barren landscapes, desolate stone spires, temperate forests, deserts that howl with the wind that mourns of what was left behind. It is with this backdrop that Fern travels across rural Nevada, on a journey to recover herself.

Following her husband’s death and the shutting down of Empire, a small town built around Empire’s once booming mining industry, Fern is emotionally and geographically displaced. In a misplaced attempt to cope with her loss, Fern joins Linda May and others as a modern-day nomad, constraining her worldly possessions within the four walls of her beat up white van. Maybe this way, she can avoid the loneliness that has devoured her heart.

But that isn’t it.

One day many years past, Fern had unconsciously tied her identity to that of her husband and the town of Empire. It is because of this that Fern feels so intensely lost when she loses both these things, she is no longer tethered to signposts that she once used to navigate her surroundings.

There is a scene from Nomadland that I can’t get out of my head.

It’s around the third quarter of the film, right before Fern resolves to try moving in with Dave. The frigid winter breeze drags across the otherwise empty carpark that Fern’s van cubbies on. The heating from Fern’s van has failed her. She huddles under layers of thick sheets, desperately trying to stifle out the frost that will inevitably consume her. Off kilter, Ludovico Einaudi’s haunting Oltremare kicks into full gear. It is at this moment that I realised Fern was completely and unequivocally alone.

Through Nomadland, we see Fern’s attempts to reconcile her new nomadic lifestyle with the bruised emptiness she feels. She attends Bob Wells’ community events, takes on seasonal jobs, sees long-time friends come and go, witnesses the cycle of birth and death, even moves in with Dave to see if a romantic partner is what she was yearning for this whole time, but these are all distractions. At the end of the day, Fern doesn’t want to move on, but she must. She has to, if she wants to live for herself.

It is thus in the closing frames of Nomadland that so clearly parallel the film’s opening that Zhao’s brilliance as a director and storyteller is made clear.

After all this time, Fern returns to the now abandoned ghost town that was once Empire. She walks through the decaying town, empty swingsets and browning trees, yellowed curtains drawn shut to hide those that fled the town. Fern steps into what used to be her house, her fingers appreciating the textures of the peeling wallpaper. Finally, she steps out into the backyard, staring past the fence looking over the grand Nevada expense. And she knows that she can move on.

As with the beginning of the film where Fern chooses to keep her husband’s items, she now returns to the storage house and tells the owner he can throw it all away. Nomadland ends with Fern once again driving into the Nevada sunset, her van shrinking to the size of a watermelon seed. Fern has regained her sense of identity once more.

That’s what amazes me about Nomadland.

There is much to commend Zhao for, the freeform camerawork and incorporation of real actors that squarely reveals where she has taken inspiration from Terrence Malick, the raw honesty that underlies Fern’s journey, the masterful editing. Above all this however, I find Zhao’s portrayal of the human condition deeply compelling.

Fern can never gain back what she’s lost. But she is not the same person we began the film with. She has changed, and so have you.

Bob Wells

“One of the things I love most about this life is that there’s no final goodbye. You know, I’ve met hundreds of people out here and I don’t ever say a final goodbye. I always just say, ‘I’ll see you down the road.’ And I do. And whether it’s a month, or a year, or sometimes years, I see them again.”

3. Mediocre, unsatisfying pseudo-conclusion

I’ll admit, my half-assed attempt to explore the shifting forms identity can take in different pieces of work might have devolved into a Chloé Zhao fanpost at some point in the writing, but if masterpieces like Nomadland and Titanic (1997) have taught me anything, the journey is much more important than the destination.

Perhaps the subject I wanted to explore was too big an undertaking for my NS-inundated, persistence-lacking mind to work on at this point of time. Hopefully I’ll have another chance to revisit this topic in a future essay, because I really am intrigued by the way many writers have intentionally or otherwise latched onto this common topic within their works.

Still, thanks for reading. Till my next post~

Soli deo Gloria.